Uday Kukde

Many international environmental and climate change organisations like The Climate Reality Project, Greenpeace, Fridays for Future, WWF are doing a good job by raising the issue of climate justice. Climate Justice is one of the main issues we should talk about while advocating the climate change movement. These organisations also work through various branches all over the world and raise the issue of the century through their work.

When we look at the daughter branches of these organisations in India, we can clearly observe that they are not at all concerned about climate justice and other values that their parent organizations stand for. India is perceived as a poor country by the developed western countries, but when we study the social fabric of Indian society, we can hardly ignore caste. The role played by caste in every resistance movement covered by the mainstream media in India should be taken note of.

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Ritesh

Today 10th August, is the birth anniversary of of the queen of justice– Phoolan Devi. Let’s today remember her with unpopular facts of her life’s journey. At the age of 31, in 1994, Phoolan Devi was released from jail after spending a decade without any trial. After a traumatizing childhood & a terrible youth, Phoolan Devi came out with a vision.

She was learning to read & write, aspiring to get educated. A first-generation Bahujan learner, walking on the path of Savritimai Phule who said: 'Awake, arise and educate, smash traditions – liberate'.

She later founded Eklavya Sena, an organization that fights against caste atrocities & for the liberation of marginalized-oppressed women, facing caste-based sexual violence. In one of her speeches in Patna, she said “Eklavya was our emancipator. Our exploiters severed his thumb and sent him to the jungle. But now, times have changed. There are hundreds of Eklavyas. Today, if any Dronacharya tries to severe the thumb of an Eklavya, his hands will be chopped off.” Adding, “Eklavya sena shall never be a mute witness to the atrocities against the poor. They should oppose it”

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Milind Thokal

Anniversaries are occasions for remembrance and renewal: these are the stock taking moments, we must introspect our achievements and failures. On this day we must ask ourselves whether we are truly Independent? Does this Independence belong to all of us equally? Has this Independence unfolded its wings to the lower strata of our society, to the SCs and STs of India? When we talk about India’s Independence from colonizers (Britishers) we have an answer for this and obviously it’s, Yes! But, what about Independence from the caste system that continues to thrive, and which has in a true sense destroyed the social harmony of the country? Free we are from the hold of British forces, but are we free from the clutches of the caste system, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, sanitation, rapes, honour killings, lynching, misogyny, agriculture and water crises, etc?

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Vinith Kumar

[This is part 1 of a series of essays on Dravidian politics today and its historical roots.]

There are pessimists who say that there is no guarantee that victory will be followed by a New Order. There is perhaps room for this pessimism. The New Order, which is the ideal of labour, has its roots in the French Revolution. The French Revolution gave rise to two principles—the principle of self government and the principle of self-determination. The principle of self-government expresses the desire of the people to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others, whether the rulers be absolute monarchs, dictators, or privileged classes. It is called ‘democracy’. The principle of self-determination expresses the desire of a people united by common ideals and common purposes to decide, without external compulsion, its political status—whether independence, interdependence, or union with other peoples of the world. This is called nationalism. The hope of humanity was centred on the fructification of these principles. Unfortunately, after a lapse of nearly 140 years, these principles have failed to take root. The old regime has continued either in all its nakedness or by making sham concessions to these two principles. Barring a few countries, there was neither self-government nor self determination in the world. All this, of course, is true. But this is no argument against the attitude taken by labour—namely, that the preliminary condition for the establishment of the New Order is victory over the forces of Nazism. All that this means is that Labour must be more vigilant and that the war must not stop with victory over Nazis, but there must be no peace unless there is victory over the Old Order wherever it is found.

Dr. Ambedkar, BAWS vol 10, Why Indian Labour is Determined to Win the War

Democracy in the middle of a pandemic  

Now that the dust has settled on TN elections, it is safe to assume that one won’t be called the BJP’s B team. Although, the risk of being called a communist still runs wild.

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Chanchal Kumar

Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet was among the first artists to popularize the idea of the homeland as the distant, absent lover. Writing from exile for most of his life and spanning a career that covered more than four decades, he achieved widespread acclaim with poems that both celebrated and mourned the memory of Palestine where he grew up as a child. In her 2019 book Mahmoud Darwish: Palestine's Poet and the Other as the Beloved, the author Dalya Cohen-Mor writes about the poet: "Blending nationalist verse with love poetry, he created a new kind of patriotic poem in Arabic, or a new kind of love poem, in which Palestine is fused with the figure of the beloved and is the object of erotic attention." (Cohen-Mor2).

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Sagar Kumbhare

“May be I was wrong, all the while, in understanding world. In understanding love, pain, life, death. There was no urgency. But I always was rushing. Desperate to start a life. All the while, some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.”

These unsettling words of Rohith have brought forth the horrific reality of caste based discrimination, exclusion, and humiliation of Dalit students in the Universities of India. However, this is not the first time a Dalit student committed suicide, nor was he the last. 27-year-old Dalit student Muthukrishnan took his own life at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

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Bhavani Etikala

In Telugu cinema, caste issues and atrocities were untouched concepts on the big screen until late. In 2020, Palasa 1978, a period-revenge-drama set in the 80's, was released. Debut director Karuna Kumar said that the film was based on real incidents. The movie acknowledged the deep rooted reality of castesim in the Telugu states through the lens of a Dalit film maker. This film was appreciated at many levels, mainly for being able to shape the Dalit resistance on screen and the entry of the Dalit film maker into main stream film making which was absent till now.

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